American Dirt: When compassion gets canceled

Just over one month into 2020, we might have seen the greatest literary controversy of the year. It doesn’t involve book burning, but it does involve Oprah, Salma Hayek, a seven-figure author advance, and an unforgivable thoughtcrime.

When Jeanine Cummins set out to write another book in 2013, she balked at the idea of writing from the perspective of a Latina woman. Cummins has a Puerto Rican grandmother, but “in every practical way, my family is mostly white,” she admitted in the New York Times several years ago.

So far, her stories had stayed fairly close to home. Her first book was a memoir, A Rip in Heaven, published in 2004. It recounted the violent murder of Cummins’s two cousins and the aftermath that left her family reeling for years.

After that, Cummins switched to novels; first, The Outside Boy, a story about a young Irish gypsy who is discriminated against for his identity. Next, she wrote The Crooked Branch, a story about the Irish potato famine.

Cummins has Irish heritage, and her husband is an Irish immigrant. So far, she had, as the liberal gatekeepers would put it, “stayed in her lane.”

But with American Dirt, she wanted to do something different. Cummins hoped to write about Mexican immigrants to reveal what their plight looked like from their own perspective. This was back in the early 2010s — during the Obama administration and a few years before the national conversation about immigration became even more frenetic under President Trump.

The moment she began the novel, Cummins anticipated backlash. How would it look for a white author to write a story about Mexicans?

“I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants,” she writes in the author’s note. “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”

Yet, she said at a recent book talk in Washington, D.C., “I felt I had something of value to contribute to the conversation.”

So she went forward.

“When I interacted with the people whose lives were most deeply affected by the crisis at the border, I saw what real courage looks like,” she explained, “and it made me sort of recognize the cowardice of being afraid to write a book.”

After years of research and two drafts she described as “bad,” Cummins wrote American Dirt — this time, from the perspective of immigrants. The story follows Lydia and her son, Luca, as they flee Mexico for the United States after a drug cartel kills their family.

In its focus on innocent victims of a tragedy, Cummins says, American Dirt was a lot like her memoir, A Rip in Heaven. “I really wanted to take the stories away from the violent men who are at their center and give them to the people who suffered and endured that violence on the flip side,” she said.

It sounds as if Cummins had the best of intentions. She also benefited greatly from the novel. Publisher Flatiron Books won a contentious bidding war to claim the book, offering Cummins a seven-figure advance. The film rights were sold, and American Dirt even nabbed a coveted spot in Oprah’s Book Club.

“From the very first sentence,” Oprah gushed on CBS, “I was in.”

American Dirt earned back-cover blurbs from Stephen King, John Grisham, and Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros. Don Winslow called it a “Grapes of Wrath for our times.”

Then, as quickly as the book had gathered its name as 2020’s first must-read, it fell from grace. As soon as it came out on Jan. 21, Hispanic reviewers eviscerated the book, calling it insensitive, full of stereotypes, and even racist. Author David Bowles slammed it as a “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama.”

Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez said American Dirt owed its success to a “low standard.”

“This is a wonderful, melodramatic telenovela, something I would love watching for cheap entertainment, like a narco-thriller on Netflix,” she said. “But this should not be called by anyone ‘the great immigrant novel, the story of our time, The Grapes of Wrath.’”

Despite Cummins’s supposedly painstaking research, from visiting both sides of the border to enlisting Hispanic readers, she seems to have little knowledge of Mexican culture.

As Bowles writes in his review, the passage where Lydia scoffs that La Lechuza, “the owl,” is an unscary name for a drug lord, makes sense only to non-Hispanic readers.

“A ‘lechuza’ is a screech owl,” he writes. “They have been feared throughout Mexico for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, considered harbingers of death, witches in disguise. Lydia’s reaction is that of the White readers, not actual Mexicans. And this is just one of literally dozens of examples.”

Online critics couldn’t stop criticizing the book, from its contents to its accompanying aesthetic: the barbed wire floral decorations at a publishing event and Cummins’s barbed wire manicure, which one critic called a “fetish.”

Mexican author Reyna Grande, who blurbed the book, partially walked back her endorsement, saying, “When the criticism started to be heard, I understood where they were coming from, and I do think the Latino community is making some valid points. After I blurbed the book, I found out about the bidding war and the seven-figure advance, and I felt hurt. I felt undervalued, and I was angry as well.”

Latino authors are told that immigrant stories don’t sell, Grande says, yet suddenly, publishers “fight each other for the privilege” to publish Cummins’s story.

Cisneros, however, has added no such caveat to her support.

“It’s going to be someone who wants to be entertained, and the story is going to enter like a Trojan horse and change minds,” she said in response to the backlash. “And it’s going to change the minds that, perhaps, I can’t change.”

While some critics complained about Cummins’s ethnicity, and one New York Times reviewer spent much of her review worrying that she, as a white woman, was not the right one to review the book, others had a much simpler criticism.

“The real failures of the book, however, have little to do with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a novelist,” wrote literary critic Parul Sehgal.

The worst you can really say about American Dirt comes from its own pages, in a description Lydia offers about a friend’s poem: “It was both grave and frivolous.”

The truth, as is almost always the case with these sorts of controversies, lies somewhere between the two extremes of condemnation and praise. American Dirt is no great work of literature. And although I will defer to others as regards to the cultural inaccuracies of the book, I can say that the writing is only middling.

In one passage, Cummins oddly compares suppressing a scream to smothering a baby: “She fights at every moment against the scream that pulses inside her like a living thing. It stretches and kicks in her gut like Luca did when he was a baby in there. With tremendous self-control, she strangles and suppresses it.”

This is no Grapes of Wrath. But does it deserve to be called racist? While some critics have turned the American Dirt controversy into “who gets to tell whose stories,” others have offered the simpler and more accurate criticism: Cummins is a white woman writing about Hispanic people, and not doing it well.

The worrisome part of the whole controversy then, is not that Cummins has been so harshly criticized for her work, but that the criticism has pivoted from literary critique to the suppression of thoughtcrimes. Just ask Hayek.

When Oprah sent Hayek a copy of her book, she posted a selfie with it on social media, writing: “Now more than ever we need stories of hope & encouragement, endurance & the beauty of the human spirit.” But then the backlash hit, and she was quick to retract her statement.

“I thank all of you who caught me in the act of not doing my research, and for setting me straight,” she wrote the next day, “because that means you know me and gave me the benefit of the doubt; and I apologize for shouting out something without experiencing it or doing research on it.”

Thank you “for setting me straight” is a particularly chilling phrase to hear. Note that all of this occurred before Hayek even had a chance to read the book.

Hayek, just as Cummins, had been convicted in the court of public opinion for having the wrong ideas. While Hayek was forgiven through immediate and abject surrender to the mob, Cummins is still suffering the repercussions.

After several bookstores independently announced that they’d be pulling book events for American Dirt, Flatiron Books announced last week that it would be canceling all further book tours over concerns for Cummins’s safety.

“Jeanine Cummins spent five years of her life writing this book with the intent to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants,” Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said in a statement. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.”

He cited safety concerns and “specific threats” as reasons for cancellation.

For her part, Cummins has said in interviews that she has barely followed the backlash, and she maintains that she had good intentions. The publishing industry may be overwhelmingly white — just 3% of those in the industry are Hispanic, according to Publisher’s Weekly — but Cummins insists, fairly, that she can’t change who she is.

“I’m a writer, you know?” she said at one of her final book talks. “I don’t feel like I’m responsible for the problem that exists.”

To NPR, Cummins argued that her critics are “attempting to police my identity.”

“All I can do is write the book that I believe in,” she said. “And I did that.”

The American Dirt controversy has exploded thanks to a turbulent mix of identity politics, supposed cultural appropriation, and cancel culture. The novel has been not just critiqued but, as the saying goes, canceled. It is a byword in liberal literary circles, a symbol not for bad writing, but for white privilege and “white saviorism.” Cummins’s seven-figure advance and the overly effusive hype surrounding the book’s release certainly didn’t help.

Reviewers ought to critique the book, but when they turn it into an example of racism simply because Cummins is white, they turn literary criticism into a farce.

This type of blackballing has long plagued young adult literature. Last year, an author who was a “sensitivity reader” for other works of literature was accused of insensitivity for making the villain in his novel, set during the Kosovo war, Muslim. The backlash was so vicious that he ended up pulling his own book before it was published.

In the same year, author Amelie Zhao had to delay the publication of her debut novel, Blood Heir, after critics complained that the depiction of slavery in its fictional universe was offensive to African Americans.

If there’s one positive note in the American Dirt controversy, it’s that Cummins has not yet caved to the woke mob, despite its outraged cries.

“This shouldn’t happen again,” warned author Roxanne Gay, predicting what may become a trend in the publishing industry. If a white woman can be so eviscerated for writing about the Latino community, with failed execution but the best of intentions, she’s going to go back to writing about Irish people. And then, she’ll be criticized for not having diverse characters.

American Dirt should never have become a synonym for cultural appropriation, and it’s impressive, though not surprising, how many people have weighed in without actually reading the novel. Now, the controversy is less about the book itself and more about the liberal ideology pushing back against it.

The biggest problem here is not that so many who read the book criticized it, or even that some people read the book and worried whether they could comment on it because of their race. The most chilling aspect of this convoluted controversy is that those who have never touched a copy of American Dirt were so quick to condemn Cummins simply in order to be on the “right” side of the discussion, which is now not a discussion at all.

Cummins knows she has critics, but she has just one wish: “I hope people will read the book before deciding how they feel.”